The Cross Between Math and Ancient History

Recently, I found myself thinking about one of my math lessons in Anthropology class.  We had been talking about how experts in many areas of science and math come together to help anthropologists put pieces of the ancient puzzle together.

The numeration systems that we had gone over in math class came to my mind.  It's interesting to think about the symbols that we use for numbers.  They vary from the Egyptians, to Babylonians, to the Romans, to our own set of numerals, the Hindu-Arabic numeration system.

In class, we did an activity to find out what symbol represented what number in various ancient numeration systems.  This was helpful to understand that there are different ways to group objects, or numbers, other than in groups of ten.  Certain cultures group numbers by different bases.  What I mean by base, is how many numbers or objects that they place in a group.  Our numeration system is a base-ten system.  That means that we group our numbers in groups of ten.  So, the symbol that we use to represent the number eleven is 11, one group of ten, plus one more unit.  To understand base-ten, you can use base-five pieces.  This is grouping of five, instead of grouping of ten.  An example of this would be:  the symbol that represents the number six is 6 in base-ten.  In base-five the symbol is 11;  that is one group of five and one unit.  Learning this helps to understand carrying numbers in addition by making exchanges.  Some examples of base-five and base-ten can be found at this website http://www.basic-mathematics.com/base-five.html

Welcome to Math Blog!

Hello, and welcome to my math blog.  In this blog, I will be exploring whole numbers and number theory.

The symbols for writing numbers are called numerals.  A logically organized collection of numerals is called a numeration system.

We use our numeration system in just about everything that we do.  We use it to tell time, when we use money, when we pay our check at a restaurant, and figuring our paycheck at work.  Can you think of an example when you  use our numeration system?

There are various numeration systems that exist, below are a few.

Image:  earth360.com

An algorithm is a word that is pretty commonly used in math; but what is an algorithm?  An algorithm is a step-by-step process for computing.  There are many algorithms in math, and in this blog hopefully I will be able to explain a few.

Check out this explanation of algorithms at http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Algorithm.html